At the Ubuntu Developer Summit, which took place last week, it was announced that the next release of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, version 10.04, will no longer carry the GIMP in its default installation. This actually touches upon somethin I've been wanting to talk about, a problem that plagues both Linux and Mac OS X: Paint.NET is Windows-only.

Years ago I posted on Linux forums saying that I was looking for a really simple image editor. As I put it, "I am looking for the nano of image editors, not the Emacs or Vim of image editors."

My needs are basic: just crop an image, resize it, maybe mess with the colors a bit, or take the resolution down a few notches so it will fit on a webpage without taking forever to download. GIMP can do all that, but wow is it complicated.

KDE's Kolourpaint seems to do all of the things you ask for. It is available as part of the kdegraphics package. I don't think it does all of the things Thom wants, others have mentioned Krita from KOffice as perhaps being better suited to that kind of thing.

It would be kinda useful to have something at the same level as Paint.NET, but to me it's not a major big deal compared to some of the other issues outstanding on the Linux desktop.

About its Qt GUI, two options:
1. How much do the basic KDE libraries to run Kolourpaint weight? If it isn't that much, they could be shipped with Ubuntu.
2. How much would cost to port Kolourpaint to GTK+? Could it be done by more than a person at a time? I think the problem is relevant enough to, if it makes sense, assign several people to work on it.

Years ago I posted on Linux forums saying that I was looking for a really simple image editor. As I put it, "I am looking for the nano of image editors, not the Emacs or Vim of image editors." My needs are basic: just crop an image, resize it, maybe mess with the colors a bit, or take the resolution down a few notches so it will fit on a webpage without taking forever to download. GIMP can do all that, but wow is it complicated. I'm surprised nobody has come up with such a simple program.

Digikam includes a fast, basic, simple-to-use image editor that has all those features:

The funny thing is Canonical is getting into a sticky situation. They have to either:
1. Use Mono and all its problems (no matter what Miguel and Co. would like us to believe)
2. Use a KDE-based application, which are aplenty (as seen by numerous posts above).

Finally, its boiling down to -- do we really need default Ubuntu+GNOME at all as the flagship product? Why not switch to Kubuntu+KDE4 and apply all those paper-cuts and tweaks that they do with the GNOME one so we can have the top of the range applications running without apology ...

Amarok
K3B
Digikam

Why in the world can't they switch to using Kubuntu as their default offering and tweaking it to make it user-friendly? 10 iterations with Ubuntu+GNOME has not exactly set the Linux desktop on fire!

Years ago I posted on Linux forums saying that I was looking for a really simple image editor. As I put it, "I am looking for the nano of image editors, not the Emacs or Vim of image editors."

My needs are basic: just crop an image, resize it, maybe mess with the colors a bit, or take the resolution down a few notches so it will fit on a webpage without taking forever to download. GIMP can do all that, but wow is it complicated.

I'm surprised nobody has come up with such a simple program.

I understand you're saying Linux, but on the OS X side Preview will take care of all of that and can handle 16-bit per channel color depth (at least I've seen that with png format). You can also add annotations (text, shapes), but you can't actually add layers / adjustment layers / paint with various brushes / etc.

If Pixelmator supported non-destructive adjustment operations and some of the style options that PS has, I'd use it in a heartbeat since the interface seems so much nicer than PS. Not being able to adjust the exposure/style of a layer without it being permanent is too big of a constraint for me, but then again I'm using CS4 as a result so maybe I'm not the target audience.

Kolourpaint will do many basic image operations and is of course a painting program, too. For more photo-specific operations there's showfoto.

Krita will do everything else.

I don't mean to advocate KDE over other options or anything, but the fact is that they have apps which target all levels of image manipulation.

If QT and GTK could coordinate a bit on shared color/theme information such that apps can 'pick up' at least the basics of the theme of each other's toolkits, that would help. If, then, a GTK or a QT app could be made to use the file dialog of whatever desktop the user prefers, that would go a long way. At that point who cares what toolkit was used to write the app? People making install CDs, sure, but nobody else.